Anne Le Troter, The Volunteers, pigment-medicine

Exhibition from 18 February to 23 April 2022
Opening: Thursday 17 February, 4pm to 10 pm.

Curator: Émilie Renard

With the support of the ADAGP – French society for the collection and distribution of copyright in the field of graphic and visual arts within the frame of the ADAGP – Bétonsalon grant, in collaboration with the Kandinsky Library, Centre Pompidou, of Fondation Pernod Ricard and of frank elbaz gallery.

In this exhibition, Anne Le Troter continues her exploration of the mechanisms of language and the power of speech through sound, writing and installation. Laureate of the 2021 ADAGP grant dedicated to the Marc Vaux Archive, she approaches the thousands of photographic plates as a huge sound archive populated by the voices of artists. From 1920 to 1970, Marc Vaux documented the Paris art world, photographing artists and models, works of art, exhibits, salons, artists’ workshops, galleries, cafés, balls, parties as well as a great number of administrative documents. With nearly 130,000 photographs, the collection held at the Pompidou Centre’s Kandinsky Library offers an image of the Parisian art scene as a hybrid and transnational centre of creation. It bears witness to a day-to-day reality fed by individual and collective histories; widely divergent from the narrative of a homogenous modernity collected around a few heroic figures.

Anne Le Troter, Mobile sonore, 2020
Courtesy Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris

Of the five thousand artists represented, Anne Le Troter is interested in the more anonymous figures, activists and federators; such as Marie Vassilieff, who opened a “popular canteen for artists and models” in 1914, Louise Hervieu, who founded an “association to establish the health booklet” in 1937, and Marc Vaux himself, who hosted a “mutual aid centre for artists and intellectuals” in 1946. Inspired by the detours of the lives of artists involved in care, Anne Le Troter composed a sound play in which she gives voice to polyactive artists, caregivers or patients, art therapists, models, nurses, paramedics, resistance fighters. Sounding their words in the interstices of mute images, she composed conversations among them about their health, their work-related illnesses, their mobilizations, the material conditions of their lives … To do so, she invited living art workers – Victoire Le Bars, Ségolène Thuillart, Simon Nicaise, Nour Awada, Agathe Boulanger, Martin Bakero, Romain Grateau, Emmanuel Simon, Eva Barto and Juliette Mailhé – to lend their voices and talk to the “not-dead” artists of the Marc Vaux collection – Suzanne Duchamp, Henri-Georges Adam, Marie Vassilieff, Max Beckmann, Joy Ungerer, Jean Cocteau, Anne Chapelle, Bessie Davidson, Madeleine Dumas, Ossip Zadkine, Claudette Bergougnoux, Kiki de Montparnasse, Paul Éluard, Joséphine Baker... The various protagonists of this sound piece navigate through the fragments of a French history of art and of healthcare policies for artists; they observe both their affiliation with the general social security system and their social insecurity (no maternity leave, nor leave for work-related illness or injury); they recount the struggles of art workers, retrace the advent of the health booklet, listen to the gaffes of old age insurance, and allow themselves to be guided by mutual aid, pigment and medicine. Through their conversations, the people who Anne Le Troter calls “the volunteers” compose a new trans-historic identity. Together, they develop a medical autobiography of a hybrid collective body.

At Bétonsalon, this polyphonic narrative coils itself into the art centre: voices run along fragile metallic ramifications cropping out of flaws in the floor; networks of audio cables cascade softly from the ceiling to connect with tiny, shell-less speakers and come to caress a sound floor; breathing and bodily fluids make the glass surfaces vibrate. This exposed sound mechanics is incarnated in the material of the space as though by a vast, amplified, carnal envelope. The sound conductivity is everywhere fragile, requiring particular attention, from the feet to the ears. As you listen, words mingle with the noises of this reconstructed collective body and the ambient sounds adhere to the words. These two sources of sound might appear to be opposite – one discursive, the other noisy – but by listening attentively, we see that they change through contact with each other; the meaning blurs and the noise takes on meaning.

Anne Le Troter, Les mots à la bouche, 2020, dessin
Courtesy Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris

Biography

Anne Le Troter (1985) is an artist based in Paris. It was after writing two books L’encyclopédie de la matière and Claire, Anne, Laurence that she began to work cyclically on the way specific groups began to express themselves, by cumulating exhibitions, (often sound plays) that went on to become written works. Anne Le Troter thus invites groups of people, like ASMR artists to work with her (L’appétence, sound play, 2016 Salon de Montrouge and Palais de Tokyo Prize). After working on a form of commercialisation of speech—in a cycle of sound installations focusing on the figure of the telephone surveyor, a cycle spread over two solo and one group exhibition (Les mitoyennes at La BF15 in Lyon in 2015, Liste à puces at the Palais de Tokyo in 2017 and Les silences après une question at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne in 2017) – today Anne Le Troter’s work tends more towards the anticipation genre. Exhibited at the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the Rennes Biennial, Le Grand Café contemporary art centre in Saint Nazaire, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Centre Pompidou, the artist has begun a new writing cycle around the idea of biography, fiction and utopia. In 2019, she was awarded the Villa Kujoyama Prize in Kyoto, in 2021 the Mondes Nouveaux grant as well as the ADAGP– Bétonsalon research grant in association with the Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou. After the exhibition Les Volontaires, pigments-médicaments at Bétonsalon, in 2022 her work will be shown at the Institut d’art contemporain in Villeurbanne and at Ygrec in Aubervilliers.